Proceso motivacional originado en escenarios cooperativos - Interdependencia

Wherever there is exploitation and repression there will be resistance. This resistance often takes many forms and extends well beyond organised protest to include far more nuanced, subtler forms of dissent that are often overlooked. Indeed there has been a steady stream of what Sami Shalom Chetrit (2000:52) calls “passive radicalism” involving disobedience of the law, low rates of conscription in to the military and high dropout rates from school. The founding of the Black Panthers in 1971 was the

watershed event which heralded a new Mizrahi discourse (ibid.). They took their name from the black revolutionary struggle in the United States and were the first to draw parallels with their oppression and similar situations around the world, particularly the movement of their namesake (ibid.).They were also the first Mizrahim in politics to make the connection between the discrimination against the Palestinians and their own communities (ibid.). Not surprisingly they were targeted by the establishment and due to many factors including the lack of political experience and organisation the movement collapsed (ibid.). However the Black Panthers had a formidableimpact on Israeli politics and on the construction of the Mizrahi identity.

However for the purposes of this research what shall be discussed here is the Wadi Salib uprising of 1959, named after the Wadi Salib slum area of Haifa where the protests began. The immediate cause was the provision of newly built housing to recently arrived Polish immigrants, that had been earmarked for Mizrahi families still living in slum conditions (Giladi 1990:253). Then rumours swept through the neighbourhood that a Moroccan had been shot dead by the police during the protests and riots began (Massad 1996:60). Political activists called for an end to the Ashkenazi discrimination and hegemony and the riots later spread across the country throughout Mizrahi camps and slum areas (ibid.). The government responded by delegitimising the leaders labelling them “criminals” and “hooligans”; adding that they were trying to create sectarian divisions amongst the Jewish people (ibid.). The Israeli state has developed effective means for dealing with the organised dissent of the Mizrahim: the typical strategy is to co-opt key figures in these movements with apartments and jobs, and reiterate to the public the critical necessity of “Jewish national unity”. Indeed the Wadi Salib uprising was largely diffused by the massive co-optation of leading activists in the rebellion (Chetrit 2000:53). This is significant as it illustrates the extent to which the Mizrahi identity dilemma is part of maintaining the organised class structures in Israeli society as the dichotomy between “Arab” and “Jew” discourages solidarity and cooperation with the Palestinians, as “Arabness” is the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder and simply leads to rejection (Shohat 1999:16); whilst “Jewishness”, is perceived to provide access to a valued identity, nationalist alliances and the benefits of the modern Jewish state. Thus the belief is created that there is no intra-Jewish discrimination, all the Mizrahim have to do to

progress in society is become “Israeli” by forgetting their history, dropping their accent and discarding their “Arabness” – in fact they just have to “Ashkenazify”.37 This serves to keep the majority of Mizrahim loyal to the Israeli state by co-opting them into the nationalist narrative and its duplicitous promises of solidarity, security and modernity.

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6.1 “Quality Control”: Concerns in the Zionist Establishment

In the face of growing Yemenite immigration to Palestine, Vladmir Jabotinsky, the leader of Zionist Revisionism, was adamant that Ashkenazi Jews preserve their majority status in Palestine, and moreover expressed his opposition to marriages between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jews because he did not know if this would be beget ‘a brilliant people or a dull race’.38 In fact, as was discussed earlier, the Zionist establishment was not too keen, in the beginning, on bringing Jews from Arab countries to Israel at all: ‘There are countries, and here I am talking about the

countries of North Africa, whose Jews need not emigrate. It is not a question of the number of people, but of their quality.’39 These statements regarding the “quality” of non-Ashkenazi Jews were echoed by many of Israel’s founding members and reveal the eugenic concerns that are inextricably bound up in the Zionist narrative itself:

For Ashkenazim, Zionism represented a movement of transformation, in which the European Jews, perpetually marginalised, could be reborn as the “new Jews”, free from the stigmas of old. The “new Jew” would be physically strong, agile and without the weaknesses that had been perceived to plague them in the Diaspora (Khazzoom 2003:493). In the pre-state Zionist establishment much emphasis was placed on generating the desired characteristics of the “new Jew” and indeed Sachlav Stoler-Liss has researched some of the eugenic proposals such as castrating the mentally ill and sterilizing the poor advocated by key figures in the Zionist establishment.40 These included Joseph Meir, who served as head of the Israeli Sick

37

Conversations with Dr Smadar Lavie, 28/09/05, Tel Aviv & Dr Rafi Shubeli, 29/09/05, Rehovot.

38

Jabotinsky V ‘Jews of the East’ 1919 cited in Haaretz 22nd July 1983.

39

Quoting Moshe Sharett, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in the Shared Report 12th December 1948 cited in Massad (1996:56).

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Fund (Kupat Holim) for thirty years, and who explicitly stated in 1934 that European Jewish mothers had an obligation to bear only healthy children:

Who should be allowed to raise children? Seeking the right answer to this ques- tion, eugenics is the science that tries to refine the human race and keep it from de- caying… Doctors, athletes, and politicians should spread the idea widely: Do not have children unless you are sure that they will be healthy, both mentally and physically.41

Stoler-Liss (2003:110) demonstrates that those in the Zionist establishment saw connections between the Zionist movement and Social Darwinism, believing that Zionist children tended to be taller and stronger than those from non-Zionist circles as only the strongest and healthiest Jews accepted Zionism. Physicians and psychologists in the Zionist movement went to great lengths imposing an onslaught of information, indoctrination and systems of regulation on European Jewish women throughout their childbearing years in order to ensure the high quality (European) Jewish population they perceived as essential for building the Jewish state (Ibid:104). Indeed many of the population “quality” concerns expressed by the Zionist establishment are reminiscent of those levelled at Jews in European anti-Semitic discourse. In this discourse Jews were characterised as dark, dirty and poor and chastised for having too many children (Khazzoom 2003:490&495). These characterisations echo in the Ashkenazi descriptions of the Mizrahim (and the Palestinians), also portrayed as dirty, lazy and poor, along with other pejorative descriptions (Dahan Kalev 2001). In anti- Semitic Europe the Jews were constructed as backward and inferior precisely because they came from the East and so were orientalised by a Europe that wished to define itself in opposition to the Eastern “other” (Khazzoom 2003:491). Khazzoom illustrates how these Orientalist stigmas were internalized through a complex process and then imposed on another group (the Jews from the Arab world & the Palestinians) through Zionism as part of the destigmatization process of the Jews from Europe. This process is clearly explained by Shohat (1998:31):

The leitmotif of Zionist texts was the cry to be a “normal civilized nation”, without the “distortions” and forms of pariahdom “typical” of the gola (diaspora), of the state of being a non nation-state. The “Ostjuden”, perennially marginalized by Europe, realized their desire of becoming Europe, ironically, in the Middle East, this time on the backs of their own “Ostjuden”, the Eastern Jews.

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Thus Israel continuously represents itself as a Western entity with a solid East/West dichotomy because by defining other groups (the Mizrahim & the Pales- tinians) as defective it simultaneously reinforces its own (Ashkenazi) more favourable identity. Importantly this is then used to legitimize the Ashkenazi dominance and mo- nopolization of resources (Khazzoom 2003:483).

The potency of the Orientalist narrative and its committed relationship to Modernisation theory is clearly visible in its application to the Mizrahim and thus demonstrates its capacity for being reshaped, reproduced and transposed according to the needs of the dominant group (ibid.). Indeed Israel’s leading intellectuals spent great efforts researching what was termed the “primitive mentality” of the Mizrahi Jews: Karl Frankenstein, a celebrated professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the man considered the founder of the Israeli education system, wrote ‘the

primitive mentality of many of the immigrants from backward countries can be compared to that of the primitive expression of children, the retarded or the mentally disturbed’.42 The “retarded mentality” of Mizrahi Jews was confirmed by such “scientific” analysis as described in the book ‘The Children of the Melah: The

Cultural Retardation Among Moroccan Children and Its Meaning In Education’ by

Fuerstein and Richel (1953) where they stated:

Various non-verbal examinations conducted prove retardation of one to two years, and very often even more, in comparison with youth of similar age in Europe. Are we to interpret this as biological inferiority and to see their difficulties as an expression of lack of intellectual abilities and limitations in psycho physiological activity?43

This symbiosis of social science and biology was a deep-seated characteristic of mainstream Israeli sociology producing work centred on Social Darwinist notions. In more contemporary sociological research, mainstream Israeli academia has attached itself to the edifice of modernisation theory, which instead of explicitly linking poverty and underdevelopment to ethnic or racial inferiority, conveniently targets “traditions” and “culture” as explanations for social and economic inequality. Indeed Dahan-Kalev (2001) explains that the proximity of the founders of Israeli sociology to the Zionist project blurred the difference between the academy and the political establishment and as such, the “scientific” conceptualisation of Mizrahi

42

Cited in Shohat (1998:8) & Wurmser (2005:3).

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defects in the spirit of modernisation theory, not only formed the contours of Israeli sociology but also constituted the basis of state policy. This is apparent in the analyses of the Mizrahi fertility decline which reproduce the official modernisation narrative, frequently citing “culture” as a reason for the “pre-modern” fertility rates of non- European Jews (see Okun 1997).

It can be seen that in orientalising the Mizrahim, the Ashkenazi elite simply took the arsenal of images and symbols that had been used to exclude them and applied them, largely unchanged, to the Mizrahim (Khazzoom 2003:500). One area where this is particularly conspicuous is the family: As the large families of European Jews had once been a symbol of their “otherness” and “inferiority”, family size became the signifier between “modern” and “pre-modern” Jews in Israel (Melamed 2005:18; Khazzoom 2003:501). The larger family size of Mirzahi Jews was heavily stigmatized and Mizrahi Jews labelled as “irresponsible breeders” in media reports and in parliamentary debates (Melamed 2005:16). Even today in discussions on the economy and state benefits, “large families” are described as a burden on the state, and indeed the phrase “families of many children” has a racialised and degrading connotation in the Israeli context (ibid.). In fact by the late 1950s having a large family was beginning to be embarrassing, as mothers with many children were ridiculed by medical staff and social workers.44 Indeed because large families were beginning to be seen as a marker of social inferiority this prompted some members of the Zionist establishment to issue statements regarding the respect that should be accorded to mothers of large families, as it was felt this attitude was harming the demographic needs of the state (Melamed 2005:34).

The fact that higher fertility is implicated as a cause and signifier of poverty is testament to the widespread presence of Malthusian rationale in Israeli social policies, educational materials, the media and society (see Kanaaneh 2002). In fact Melamed (2005:15) states that Malthusianism is more than just a population theory; it is in actuality a powerful cultural and political discourse that not only provides a “justification” for understanding high fertility as a causal mechanism for poverty and underdevelopment, but is also a highly effective tool in the process of reproductive “othering” – categorizing groups into “reproductively modern” and “reproductively primitive”. Since Zionism adopts the Orientalist narrative and was partly a

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transformation project aimed at “modernization” through “Westernization”; the synergy of Zionism, Orientalism and Malthusianism serves to classify only the reproductively modern – those of small, planned, Westernized families – as capable of producing citizens of quality for the Jewish state. Thus in the case of Israel (as in many other contexts) this reproductive othering serves to distinguish between those who should be encouraged to reproduce and those who should not.